1. Field
Embodiments of the invention relate to monitoring virtual infrastructures and, in particular, to systems and methods for analyzing performance of interrelated objects in a virtual computing environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
Information technology specialists, or system administrators, are responsible for maintaining, managing, protecting and configuring computer systems and their resources. More and more, such maintenance includes ensuring multiple users local and remote access to vast resources of data over a great number of computer applications and systems, including the Internet. Moreover, system administrators are asked to provide access to these highly reliable systems at practically any time of day while ensuring the system's integrity is not threatened by dataflow bottlenecks or excessive overhead.
In addition, many companies now take advantage of virtualization solutions to consolidate several specialized physical servers and workstations into fewer servers running virtual machines. Understanding the performance of a virtual infrastructure, however, is a complex challenge. Performance issues with virtual machines can be based on a variety of factors, including what is occurring within the virtual machine itself, problems with the underlying platform, problems caused by consumption of resource(s) by other virtual servers running on the same underlying platform, and/or problems of priority and allocation of resource(s) to the virtual machine(s). When seeking to ensure performance and maximize uptime, administrators often struggle to understand and monitor the virtual infrastructure, and also to quickly diagnose and resolve problems. Additionally, being able to perform capacity planning and analysis, and in many cases, better understand utilization and costs associated with the virtual infrastructure compounds the challenge.
Moreover, performance statistics captured inside virtual machines for rates (e.g., bytes per second) and resource utilization (e.g., CPU utilization) can often be unreliable. For instance, problems with rate determinations can occur because a clock second inside a virtual image varies in duration and does not match a clock second in the physical or real world. In addition, many conventional monitoring systems are designed to operate strictly on a threshold approach, in which once a predetermined value is reached by a particular measurement, an alarm is triggered. Such monitoring systems oftentimes do not allow for flexibility in analyzing data in a virtual environment and/or do not provide the user with useful information to prevent, or correct, the underlying problem(s) prior to, or after, the alarm is triggered.